G+ The Social Network for Robots, Now for Humans Too

Google has or has had agreements in place to display results from various social networks over the years.  Whether or not due to an agreement or an algorithmic tweak, results from twitter.com, facebook.com, linkedin.com, yelp.com and many others show up on top of Google some days and then disappear the next.

There is no question that Google has had some pretty clumsy and insincere  attempts into social media.  Today it seems there has been a shift in the culture which will ultimately have  a major impact on their social media efforts, they seem to have placed internal value on design – THANK YOU!

Seeing how Google has varied results from the sites where people are sharing all the content Google+ started to make sense.  It made sense to me as a platform to re-post all of my social media from every site I interact with – that way Google would certainly index and hopefully display my activity and content, YAY.

Unfortunately if no one is actually on Google+ it makes for a pretty lame social experience.  My initial thoughts were Google+ is going to be doomed because I was mainly using it as a robot, re-posting automatically without logging in or spending any time on the site.  I still don’t spend a lot of time on Google+ but they are adding some features that are making it a more enticing and engaging platform.

Hangouts is not only cool but works very well.  With hangouts you can create video chat rooms and control user access.  It can save the recorded events to your youtube channel.  You can even place a widget on your website so anyone who is on your site can view the event you are streaming from the hangout!  This is a major time saver, now you don’t have to record your company meeting, upload it to you tube, go back to your website to embed it.   Also someone can maintain some control over the event, changing the main portion of the viewing area to display a specific users video or other items from their computer.

With the addition of Hangouts, G+ is starting to become a more appealing place to spend time.